Culture MUSIC
44 NEWSWEEK.COM NOVEMBER 27, 2020
“It looked like rap
and hip-hop
had totally passed
him by. He wasn’t
on the cutting
edge anymore. He
really felt like he
was done for.”on that first trip, he showed me the
land where Paisley Park was going
to be built; it was just a field then.
And I asked, “What does Paisley Park
mean?” He said: “It’s a place where
you can go to be alone.” I’m not a
believer in premonitions, but I got
this shiver up my back. I thought:
“He’s gonna die there alone.”
Another revelation in your book
is that in the ’90s Prince commis-
sioned you to draft a manifesto
about changing his name to an
unpronounceable symbol, and
that the document was supposed
to accompany a will.
Only his manager and myself knew
that he was changing his name to
that. He was very fed up with the
music business. It looked like rap and
hip-hop had totally passed him by. He
wasn’t on the cutting edge anymore.
He really felt like he was done for.
He paid me to write a magazine
article for him. I interviewed him
about why he was changing his name
to a glyph. He said it was going to be
buried in a time capsule with his will
and the Love Symbol album. I never
saw the will. He said the time capsule
was buried on the grounds of Pais-
ley Park. The estate has sold off little
parcels of land already. I think they’ll
be [breaking] ground on Paisley Park
condos in 30 years, and it’ll come up.You write that Prince’s love of
the color purple came from the
classic children’s book Harold
and the Purple Crayon by
Crockett Johnson.
Harold was this little boy who could
draw himself out of whatever real-
ity he’s in with this purple crayon.
He’d be sleeping in his bed and if he
wanted to run away from home, he’d
draw a window and climb down that.
That was his favorite bookYou describe two big things that
broke Prince down. The ɿrst was
the death of his one-week-old son
Amiir in 1996, followed by his wife
Mayte’s miscarriage. The second
was the physical pain Prince was
in after years of performing.
Losing those two children destroyed
him...and that he couldn’t dance and
wouldn’t be able to play the piano or
guitar much longer. His arms hurt.
On our last phone call, he said: “I’m
tired.” In 31 years, that was the only
time I ever heard him say “I’m tired.”
It’s heartbreaking what happened. But
the thing is, it wasn’t at the end of his
life. He’d been in pain from Purple Rain
on. Yes, the death [was from] fentanyl,
but I think those other things really are
what killed him. He would just not stop
[performing]. He played for so long.You write about a time in 1998
when you were recovering at home
from a leg injury and Prince visited.
You saw him taking the Percocet
you’d been prescribed.
It broke my heart. We never discussed
it again. I don’t know if that was the
reason [for his visit]. I didn’t feel like:
“Oh, he came over just to snarf drugs.”
I think it was just a sign of how much
pain he was in. He wasn’t getting
high. He really was a human—he
was a superhero in a human’s body,
unfortunately. Oscar Wilde had thatsaying: “Each man kills the thing he
loves.” I think it was reversed with
Prince, and actually Muhammad Ali,
his hero of all time, where what they
both loved killed them.When Prince called you
unexpectedly a few weeks before
he died in 2016, did you have an
idea that something was wrong?
I did. I tried to call him out after that—
to no avail—by calling his archenemy,
Minneapolis Star-Tribune gossip col-
umnist C.J., [to do an interview]. I had
never talked about Prince. This was
like two or three weeks before he died.
I wanted him to call me: “Why are you
doing this?” Everyone was trying their
own ways at intervention. Alan Leeds,
who ran Paisley Park Records, tried
to get through and he couldn’t. His
former band mate André Cymone
was texting him: “I’m homeless. Can I
come and stay at Paisley Park for a few
days?”—and Andre was happily mar-
ried with kids. Everyone was trying,
but they couldn’t penetrate that circle.
There was no one to say “no” to him.What do you want readers to come
away with?
That there was an actual human
being there. It was a tragic story,
and yet one of victory at the end.
He was able to express himself. I
think he was a true genius but it
was torturous—he couldn’t turn his
brain off: “I have 16 things going on
in my head at once.” And it was a
burden. That’s why I started with an
epigraph from Albert Einstein: “It is
strange to be known so universally
and yet to be so lonely.” FROMTOP:
LIFE
P
ICTURE^ COLLE
CTIO
NʔGETTY ^SINEAD^
LYNCHʔAFPʔ
GETTY ^CARLOSG
ONZALEZʔ
STARTRIBUNEʔGETTYDEARLY BELOVED Clockwise from top:
Onstage during his mid-’80s commerical
peak; with then-wife Mayte Garcia
in 1999; and an aerial photo of his
Minnesota studio and sanctuary, Paisley
Park, taken on the day he died in 2016.